Wikidata:Property proposal/British Museum thesauri

British Museum thesaurus ID

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Authority control

Done: British Museum thesaurus ID (P3632) (Talk and documentation)

Description	identifier in the British Museum thesaurus: object type, ceramics ware, subject...
Represents	British Museum thesauri (Q28693490)
Data type	External identifier
Domain	various
Allowed values	x\d+
Example	Alhambra (Q47476) → x56901 Alhambra style () Achille Brocot (Q4673700) → x86193 Brocot watch escapement () Akahada ware (Q11635959) → x18541 Akahada ceramics ware
Source	see below
Formatter URL	http://collection.britishmuseum.org/id/thesauri/$1

Motivation

The British Museum has a number of thesauri that are important for cultural heritage, yet not coreferenced to anything in the world. I think BM would see it as a major win if the community helps them to coreference. I considered the thesauri in 3 major groups:

British Museum person or institution ID (P1711): created
Wikidata:Property proposal/British Museum place: proposed
The rest: BM-thes-count.txt heading GLOBAL: 28 more thesauri with 26804 entries. They can be put in the same prop since they all use the same namespace.

I won't lie, WD doesn't include some important entries for artistic periods/styles. Eg the two marked (*) above are problematic:

Alhambra style is different from the place where it originated,
Brocot watch escapement is different from the person who created it.

But by putting these thesauri out in Mix-n-Match, we'll create visibility and let the community tackle this question.

I'd say that among these 28, the most important ones are:

thes:ethname 3351
thes:matcult 1483
thes:material 2044
thes:nationality 250
thes:political-state 191
thes:school 482
thes:state 263
thes:subject 1442
thes:technique 598
thes:object 5845
thes:ware 666 (ceramics ware)
thes:escape 88 (clock escapement)

Sources:

https://github.com/findsorguk/bmThesauri for CSV, but this lacks altLabel, broader, scheme
https://confluence.ontotext.com/display/ResearchSpace/Meta-Thesaurus+and+FR+Names#Meta-ThesaurusandFRNames-BMThesaurus for scheme name & description.
http://collection.britishmuseum.org/sparql for data. Eg the query below gets 2 of the thesauri (but not altLabels...)

prefix thes: <http://collection.britishmuseum.org/id/thesauri/>
select ?x ?label ?descr ?broader ?scheme ?schDescr {
  filter (?s in (thes:escape, thes:ware))
  ?x skos:inScheme ?s;
    skos:prefLabel ?label.
  ?s rdfs:label ?scheme
  optional {?x skos:broader [skos:prefLabel ?broader]}
  optional {?x skos:scopeNote ?descr}
  optional {?s rdfs:comment ?schDescr}
}

Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 15:57, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Support - sounds like an excellent resource to link to, and having a single namespace greatly simplifies this, let's get this added! ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:59, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:12, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Support does the data have a license? -- JakobVoss (talk) 13:36, 7 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Support Jheald (talk) 11:11, 8 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Question: how closely can we match the "Erlangen" schema that the BM uses for predicates (and to define some broad classes) in its SPARQL store? Can we identify most of them with properties/items here ? Jheald (talk) 11:11, 8 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Jheald: That's CIDOC CRM. Its classes are quite abstract (most everything interesting is E24 Man-Made Thing), and props not too specific for our purposes. --Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 15:12, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Uomovariabile (talk) 11:19, 9 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Yes to more matching with datasets that describe art and culture terminology. Wikidata indeed still misses a lot of terms for styles and cultures, I have noticed that, and this is another instrument that will help us improve that. Spinster 💬 14:27, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Vladimir Alexiev, Pigsonthewing, JakobVoss, YULdigitalpreservation, Jheald, Spinster: @ArthurPSmith, Uomovariabile: Done--GZWDer (talk) 14:49, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]